On the Street Where you Live (22 page)

“Well, if he
is
the stalker, I hope to God that one of your cameras catches him for me.”

When Eric left shortly before 7:00
P.M.
, the cameras were in place on all sides of the house. What he did not tell Emily was that he had installed others inside the house, and attached a line-of-sight antenna on an attic window. Now, within a half-mile radius, with the television set in his van, he would be able to follow her movements and hear her conversations in her living room, kitchen, and study.

As he left her with a friendly kiss on the cheek and began the return trip to Albany, he was already planning his next visit to Spring Lake.

He smiled, thinking of how she had jumped when the phone rang. She was far more unnerved than she wanted to admit, even to herself.

Fear was the ultimate weapon of revenge. She had sold her stock at peak value. Shortly after that other sell-offs had started, leading to a chain of them. Now his whole company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

He could even forgive her for that if she had not rejected him as a man. “If you will not love me, Emily,” he said aloud, “you will live your life in fear, waiting for that moment when someone steps out of the dark and you can't get away.”

O
N
M
ONDAY AFTERNOON
the backhoe that had been delivered to 15 Ludlam Avenue had turned over only one shovelful of dirt before malfunctioning. To their chagrin, the forensics experts were told that a replacement would not be available until Tuesday morning.

Bowing to the inevitable, they taped off the backyard and left a police officer to guard the premises.

At eight o'clock on Tuesday morning, even before the new backhoe arrived, the media were present. Vans displaying the logos of television channels lined the quiet streets. Helicopters hovered above the area as cameramen began to shoot aerial views of the search site. Reporters with mikes waited to see the forensic team sift through every shovelful of dirt.

Emily, in a jogging suit and sunglasses, mingled with the people standing on the sidewalk in quiet, somber groups and listened to their comments.

Everyone knew the searchers had to be looking for another body. But whose? It almost had to be Carla Harper, that young girl who vanished two years ago, they whispered among themselves. People had heard
that the police now seriously doubted that Carla had ever left Spring Lake.

Two questions were on everyone's lips: “Why did they decide to search here?” and “Was it because someone has confessed to the crime?”

Emily listened, as a young-looking grandmother pushing a stroller said grimly, “We'd better all pray that they have the killer in custody. It is too frightening to think that a murderer is on the loose in this town. My daughter, this baby's mother, is only a few years older than Martha Lawrence and Carla Harper were.”

Emily remembered what she had read in Phyllis Gates's book:
“Mother has become a fierce guardian, unwilling to have me even stroll down the street unless I am accompanied.”

Mother was right, Phyllis, she thought. She had spent Monday evening until well past midnight preparing her model of the town and marking in the streets as they had been at the time of the earlier murder. On her cardboard plan she had Monopoly houses in place, indicating where the Shapleys, the Carters, the Greggs, and the Swains had lived.

She recognized the columnist from
The National Daily,
standing not far from her, and turned away quickly, deciding to go home. I don't want
her
to collar me, Emily thought. And after last week, I certainly don't want to be here if they do uncover bodies. I already have what I need to know about 15 Ludlam Avenue.

But she still didn't see a pattern emerging that would point the finger of guilt at the nineteenth-century killer.

*   *   *

R
EBA
A
SHBY
had been on the scene on Monday, and was back on Tuesday, furiously scribbling her impressions. This was the hottest story of her entire career, and she intended to milk it dry.

Near her, Irene Cornell of CBS radio was on-air with her report: “Shock and disbelief are on the faces of the residents of this quiet Victorian town as they wait to see if the body of yet another missing young woman will be found,” she began dramatically.

At 9:30, nearly an hour and a half after the excavation began, the onlookers saw the backhoe abruptly stop digging and the forensic crew rush to look down into the hole from which the last shovelful of dirt had been taken.

“They've found something!” one person cried.

Reporters standing on the lawn, their backs to the house, their cameras focused on the backhoe, began talking urgently into their mikes.

The local spectators, some grasping a friend's hand, waited silently. The arrival of the hearse from the morgue confirmed to all of them that human remains had been found. The prosecutor arrived in a squad car and promised to make a statement shortly.

A half hour later, Elliot Osborne stepped up to the microphones. He confirmed that a full skeleton wrapped in the same heavy plastic that had contained the remains of Martha Lawrence had been uncovered. A human skull and several loose bones had been found only inches farther down. There would be no further statements until the medical examiner had
had the opportunity to complete a thorough examination and give his report on the findings.

Osborne refused to answer the dozens of questions shouted at him, the loudest of which was, “Doesn't this absolutely
prove
you have a reincarnated killer stalking this town?”

T
OMMY
D
UGGAN
and Pete Walsh had planned to follow the hearse from the crime scene to the morgue, but delayed to speak to Margo Thaler, the eighty-two-year-old present owner of the house.

Visibly upset, she was sitting in her living room, sipping a cup of tea a neighbor had prepared for her.

“I don't know if I'll ever be able to go out in my backyard again,” she told Tommy. “I had rose bushes where they found that skeleton. I used to be out there on my knees, weeding right above that very spot.”

“Mrs. Thaler, we'll make very sure that any remains have been removed,” Tommy said soothingly. “Your rose bushes can be replanted. I'd just like to ask you a few questions, and then we'll get out of your way. How long have you lived here?”

“Forty years. I'm the third owner of the house. I bought it from Robert Frieze, Senior. He owned it for thirty years.”

“Would he be the father of Robert Frieze, the owner of The Seasoner?”

A look of disdain came over Margo Thaler's face. “Yes, but Bob's nothing like his father. Divorced his lovely wife and married that Natalie woman! Then he opened that restaurant. My friends and I tried it out once. High prices and bad food.”

Bob Frieze certainly doesn't have many fans in this town, Tommy thought, as he began to do some arithmetic.

Frieze was about sixty years old. Mrs. Thaler had owned the house for the past forty years, and the Frieze family owned it for thirty years before that. That meant that Bob Frieze was born ten years after his father bought the house and lived in it for the first twenty years of his life. Tommy filed the information in his head for further consideration.

“Mrs. Thaler, we believe that the skeleton will prove to be the remains of a young woman who disappeared about two years ago, on August 5th. It seems to me that you would have noticed if someone had dug up your yard at that time of year.”

“I certainly
would
have noticed, yes.”

Which means that the remains had to have been kept somewhere else until they could safely be buried here, Tommy thought.

“Mrs. Thaler, I was on the police force here for eight years,” Pete Walsh said.

She looked sharply at him. “Oh, of course. Forgive me. I should have recognized you.”

“I seem to remember that it was your habit to leave for Florida in October and not return until May. Do you still do that?” Pete asked.

“Yes, I do.”

That explains it, Tommy thought. Whoever murdered Carla kept her body somewhere else, maybe in a freezer, until he could safely bury it here.

He stood up. “You've been very cooperative and also very kind to let us talk to you now, Mrs. Thaler.”

The elderly woman nodded, then after a pause said, “I realize how selfish it sounds for me to be concerned that I was in essence kneeling on a grave. It won't be too terribly long, I'm sure, before my children and grandchildren will be kneeling at mine. The roses were beautiful. If they don't recover from being uprooted, I'll replace them. In a way maybe it wasn't so bad that they were decorating that poor girl's grave.”

Tommy was on his way out when another question occurred to him. “Mrs. Thaler, how old is this house?”

“It was built in 1874.”

“Do you know who owned it then?”

“The Alan Carter family. They owned it for some fifty years before selling it to Robert Frieze, Senior.”

D
R
. O'B
RIEN WAS STILL
conducting his examination of the remains when Tommy Duggan and Pete Walsh arrived at the morgue.

An assistant was taking down the information as O'Brien dictated it.

As Tommy Duggan listened to the statistics, he visualized the description of Carla Harper that lay on top of his desk:
Five feet four inches tall, one hundred and two pounds, blue eyes, dark hair.

The picture in the file showed an appealing, vivacious young woman with shoulder-length hair. Now, as he listened to the stark description of the weight of her bones and the size of her teeth, Tommy thought, I'll never be tough enough to get used to this part of it.

The sum of the findings was nearly identical to the ones they had heard on Thursday. The skeleton was that of a young female. The cause of death was strangulation.

“Look at this,” O'Brien said to Duggan and Walsh. With his gloved hands he held up threads of material. “See those metal beads? This is a piece of the same scarf that we found around Martha Lawrence's neck.”

“You mean that when someone stole that scarf at the party—assuming that's what happened—he not only killed Martha with it, but cut it up so that he could use it again?” Pete Walsh sounded disbelieving.

Duggan looked at him sharply. “Go outside and get some air. I don't want you to pass out on me.”

Walsh nodded, gagging as he hurried out of the morgue.

“I don't blame him for getting sick,” Tommy Duggan said angrily. “You see what this means, Doc? This killer
is
following the 1890s timetable. There may not even have been anything personal about killing either Martha Lawrence or”—he looked at the figure on the table—“or Carla Harper, if this is her. The only reason they would have been chosen is that both Martha and Carla were around the age of the women who vanished in the1890s.”

“A comparison of dental records will establish if this is Carla Harper.” Dr. O'Brien adjusted his glasses. “The separate skull we found had been in the ground much longer than the full skeleton. My estimate is it's been there at least one hundred years. We
can reconstruct the features on the skull, but that will take time. My educated guess, though, is that it was part of the body of a young woman not more than twenty years old.”

“Carla Harper and Letitia Gregg,” Tommy Duggan said softly.

“Judging from the names printed on that postcard, it would seem likely,” Dr. O'Brien agreed. “There's something else here you'll be interested in.”

He was holding up a small plastic bag for Duggan to see.

“It looks to me to be a pair of old-fashioned earrings,” O'Brien explained. “Garnets set in silver, with a pearl teardrop. My wife's grandmother had a pair something like that.”

“Where did you find them?”

“Same as before. Folded in the hand of the skeleton. Guess the killer couldn't find a finger bone but wanted you to get the connection between the two sets of remains.”

“Do you think he found those earrings in the ground?”

“I don't think anyone can answer that. My guess is he'd be mighty lucky to find both of them. Even though, if she had been wearing them, they'd still be intact, they'd have been fastened to the earlobes, and those are long gone, of course. When in the 1890s did you say the third girl disappeared?”

“Ellen Swain disappeared on March 31st, thirty-one months and twenty-six days after Letitia Gregg vanished on August 5th. Carla Harper disappeared on August 5th. Thirty-one months and twenty-six
days this Saturday, March 31st.” Tommy knew he was not so much responding to the question as thinking aloud.

“Madeline and Martha on September 7th, Letitia and Carla on August 5th, and now you have the next anniversary coming up this Saturday,” Dr. O'Brien said slowly. “Do you think that this killer plans to choose another victim and bury her with Ellen Swain?”

Tommy Duggan felt overwhelmingly weary. He knew that this question was exactly the one the media would ask. “Doctor O'Brien, I hope and pray that
isn't
the scenario, but I promise you that everyone connected with law enforcement in this area is going to act on the premise that a psycho is planning to choose and kill another young woman from this town four days from now.”

“In your boots, I would assume that too,” the medical examiner said crisply, as he stripped off his gloves. “And with all due respect to our law-enforcement people, I'm sending
my
two daughters to visit their grandmother in Connecticut over the weekend.”

“I don't blame you, Doctor,” Tommy agreed. “I completely understand.”

And
I'll
be talking to Dr. Clayton Wilcox, whose own wife admits she gave him the scarf the night of the Lawrences' party, he thought, as he felt anger building up within him.